Pittsburgh Post-Gazette – “Don’t blow me up on this!” Steelers tackle Alejandro Villanueva joked (I think) at his locker recently. … The topic at hand was Villanueva’s devotion to a certain football team. One that competes in the AFC East and plays its home games in Foxborough, Mass.

He wasn’t just a patriot. He was a Patriot fan. …

He maintained his allegiance until he joined the Steelers three years ago. And he’s still a big Tom Brady admirer, though he admits to it with mock sheepishness.

Revisiting factors that led Patriots to accept second-rounder for Jimmy G

FOXBOROUGH, Mass. -- With Jimmy Garoppolo leading the San Francisco 49ers to four straight victories and playing some high-level football, it has sparked the question of whether the New England Patriots received enough (a 2018 second-round pick) in return for trading him.

There are multiple layers to the analysis:

Timing of trade created low-leverage situation. With the Patriots waiting to deal Garoppolo until the midseason trade deadline, they put themselves into a low-leverage situation. Had they made Garoppolo available in the 2017 offseason, the return would have surely been higher. So why did the Patriots wait? Two possible reasons: to buy more time in hopes of signing Garoppolo to an extension, or to assess how Tom Brady, turning 40 in early August, looked over the first half of the season. Garoppolo had little incentive to sign an extension with unrestricted free agency on the horizon after the 2017 season, and if that was the team’s thinking, it seems fair to call it a miscalculation. If it was about gathering more intelligence on Brady to make sure they weren’t rushing things with Garoppolo, it would be a more plausible explanation.